Monthly Archives: January 2007

57°38′72″ N, 11°51′53″ E

Tuesday, January 30, 2007 – 19:05

There has been a lot to do on board lately. We have started to work on Saturdays since we are getting closer to the departure date.I and Robert have continued to install the sonar panels and regulators. Two of the solar panels have been connected to the batteries to maintain their charge. The electric system has gone a far way, and we are seeing the finishing of this part quite soon. Jimmy is installing the consumer side of the electrics, which includes lights and switches in all cabins. The Collingwood LED:s we use are fantastic, giving a lot of light to a small power requirement.

LED installation

Greg and Rachel are almost finished with painting. The only pars of the ship left to paint are now the crew and officer’s compartments. Greg won’t be able to continue with too much work for the next month on the ship, though. Yesterday he and Jimmy were fooling around on deck and Jimmy started to chase him around the ships. When Greg tried to escape by jumping from Elida IV to the quay he missed the fact that there are mooring lines going from the ship, so he tripped on them, landing really bad on the ground.

He broke both his wrists and almost sprained one his ankles. In the evening he went to the hospital for X-raying, had to stay up all night until it was his turn, and then got both his wrists cast. His right wrist even might need surgery since that scaphoid bone is fractured.

The weather in Gothenburg has been very good the last week. The chill has turned into relatively warm weather and we are experiencing temperatures that surges up to 10 degrees Celsius.

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Life | Tagged | Comments (0)

Heavy snowfall

Sunday, January 21, 2007 – 22:01

Just after I posted the last blog entry it started to rain, and I thought that the small joy of snowfall would be gone after just a few hours. Luckily, it started to snow this morning again, and it would be even more snow than the day before.

Snow...

Last night was quite late, we watched Happy Feet (my second time), and loved all the music. Especially. “Ooooh, baby please don’t go”, by the Latino Adélie penguins. I, Greg and Annette also watched the end of Ghostbusters II, which was a funny experience. I went to bed late.

Hjalmar as usual woke me up this morning by firing a lot of plastic “donuts” from a semi-automatic toy gun on me, and I got up and had breakfeast with the others. We left Annette’s house for the last time and went for church service at Kungsportskyrkan in Huskvarna.

Dinner
Kungsporten

I liked the sermon, the pastor spoke of the dangers of “phariseism”.

After the service, we had church “fika” and lunch at the one and only hamburger restaurant, “Max”. After briefly returning to Hjalmar’s house in Bankeryd, we said goodbye to Annette and left for Göteborg and Fiskebäck. The snow was still falling very heavily, and had built up a snow cover of about two decimeters on the ground. Although a skillful driver, Robert didn’t manage to get off the parking without us having to push the car back on the road.

Stuck!

Because of the bad weather, the 160 kilometers on the way home took quite some time. The sight was reduced, and the traction was halfway gone. The only ones who drove fast were the DHL trucks, one even overtook us on the more snowy roads.

Tomorrow is working day again, and the beginning of a new week.

Oh yeah, and I will return to Västerås in the first weekend of February. I will visit my home church’s youth meeting on Saturday the 3rd and spend some time with my family.

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Life | Comments (0)

Der Schneeballschlacht

Saturday, January 20, 2007 – 20:11

Waking up to the smell of bacon and scrambled eggs this morning, we had a big American breakfeast with the addition of Swedish sour milk and cereals. Soon after the meal was finished, the grey skies outside the window started to release their payload in form of snow. White, wonderful snow in masses. The first real winter sign of the season was finally here.

The last few months, Sweden has been really warm and green. Usually the thermometer is below zero degrees Celsius between November and March, but we have only had boring rain and high temperatures. Snow was a dream I didn’t even dare do hope for, perhaps global warming had begun to show the signs already?

Well, finally the moment of winter came and after briefly visiting the A6 shopping mall outside Jönköping we had “fika” (sort-of-coffeebreak in Swedish). The snow was still falling heavily and had built up a coat of a few centimeters over the town, so we decided to finally go out and have a real snowball war. Rachel and Greg, my two Californian friends, have practically never seen snow before, let alone had a snowball war, so we had a lot of fun “dressing up” for the fight. Annette borrowed us some good snow gear, and we ran out the door to the backyard.

The concentration of snow in the air increased for about a half an hour, while snowballs were flying all over, but everybody got exhausted quickly of all the “fighting”. We had a really good time and everybody got their share of the icecream from heaven.

The afternoon ended with chicken stew w/ rice followed by Starsky & Hutch (the movie). We also found two airzookas in the house, all it takes then are a few twenty-year-olds and the Schneeballschlacht continued using air.

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Life | Comments (0)

Weekend in Bankeryd

Saturday, January 20, 2007 – 00:53

Today, Friday, we put up the anchor on the newly fastened bowsprit. The 150 kg heavy anchor is lowered and raised by hand force, using our large Harken winches to do the job. 

After finishing for the day, I and a few other people from Team Elida have went to Bankeryd just north of the city of Jönköping to stay at Annette’s house for the weekend. She has been working on Elida for two weeks before she continues her medical education on Monday.

We came to her house around eight in the evening, ate a great taco pie, played music, had fun, and watched Jonny English. Our local Canadian, Jarod, has been introduced to the team and he seems to have a really good time with us. The American/Canadian “rivality” has been made apparent at some times of joking and laughing, but everybody thinks is mostly fun.

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Life | Comments (0)

Ga(e)lic winds

Wednesday, January 17, 2007 – 18:08

We survived the storm of 14th of the January.

Our bowsprit is finished at KVA, and is waiting to be mounted. We moved the ships a bit today to allow an easier installation, but the rain stopped us from commencing that work.

I and Robert have installed cables from almost every solar panel now, and we wait for the large 35mm² cables to arrive before we can complete that part of the electrical system.

The weather is continuously getting worse. It has rained almost all day long, and the wind is increasing to a strong gale this night.

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January storm

Sunday, January 14, 2007 – 12:45

We are currently experiencing a storm here in Fiskebäck. With winds exceeding 30 m/s (Force 10-11) there is a lot going on in the water. We had watches tonight to check the moorings and fenders, but everything seems to work out.

I have been taking some photos of the storm, but since the internet connection here is quite flaky I cannot post them yet.

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Life | Tagged | Comments (0)

добрий

Friday, January 12, 2007 – 17:35

The first week onboard Elida has been fun and refreshing. I and Robert have as usual been working together on in the navigation cabin, installing antennas, radios and wires.

This radar will be turned on all the time when we are not in port and when we do not need the radar. This sounds pretty strange, but its purpose is to transmit the to the black box when we are underway. If the sun goes down, or it becomes foggy, we will start the primary radar, which gives us a sharper and larger picture.

Another antenna we got up this week was the GPS heading sensor. The heading sensor is a device which consists of two GPS receivers attached to a rig. It looks almost like a radar antenna, just that it won’t rotate. A computer knows the distance between these receivers, and can by comparing the devices calculate the exact heading the ship has.
Compared to a standard magnetic compass, this sensor displays the exact heading and not the magnetic heading.

I and Robert also got a new display installed in the navigation cabin. The depth sounder! This instrument is installed under the VHF radio and shows how the depth curve goes like.
The Ukrainians and Americans have been busy finishing the saloon floor, and have now painted two layers of topcoat over the sanded floor. Therefore that floor is now finished, and they have begun painting the passenger cabins.

Salong

Jimmy and our guest electirican Bengt-Olof have been working on the main electric central in the officer’s cabin as well as all the miscellaneous cable installations, going down down into the most remote hatches in the ship.

Jimmy
Quite a small space

NÅP, our doctor and second officer on board, has been installing our large 200mm Harken blocks for the sheets. They are really huge, here am I compared to their size.

Huge rope handling blocks

Stefan came with a delivery of life buoys today with the text “Elida V” on them.

The new life buoys

The last few days the water level has risen considerably because of bad weather. Low air pressure and eastbound winds averaging over 20 m/s (40 knots) pushes the sea water from Denmark to Sweden.

High water levels

Today, Brian and Jarod from YWAM have arrived to Elida IV to start to rebuild the ship to become the YWAM ship “Next Wave”. The plan is that that ship is to be delivered to Liverpool on the 20th of February.

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Life | Tagged | Comments (0)

One day in Fiskebäck, and counting

Monday, January 8, 2007 – 21:32

So this was my first day on Elida this year!

I arrived to the train station at eight o’clock yesterday evening, took bus no. 80 to Billdal where Stefan and Diana live. It was Diana’s and Zemias’ (their second youngest son) birthday, and all of the people onboard Elida as well as a few other folks were there to celebrate.

We came back to the ship far too late, and I went to bed a bit too late, since I had to unpack all my stuff. Almost noone on board the ship seemed to have had a good night’s sleep, since it took several hours for almost everybody I’ve spoken with for them to fall asleep.

Up at seven, quick breakfeast, then down to work. Elida V, moored just alongside Elida IV, was a joyful sight after all these weeks away. I installed the battery backup central in the navigation cabin, the system that powers all the radios and radars in case of a power failure. It went well and I am pleased with the result.

Electric mains central

The Ukrainian and the American building team aboard Elida have been working all day with painting the floor in the assembly hall, or the “saloon”. The saloon is the largest open space on the ship, and has a quite large floor that wasn’t painted yet.

Serihy, Rachel and Greg took care of the Gelcoat painting while Yevhén did the sanding. The painting works like this: First somebody spackles and sands the floor to get it really flat. Then the painting starts. After vacuum cleaning and washing the floor with Styrene, the painting starts.

Painting the Salong

Gelcoat is a plastic paint that is completely waterproof. The downside with it is that it is very slippery when it becomes wet, so we apply sand over the first layer to give it a lot more friction. The paint is going to dry tonight, so after that the painting team will vacuum clean away the sand that didn’t stick to the paint, and then they will paint a few more coats of paint to cover the sand.

In the evening we went to McDonalds to eat icecream. We have a guest on board this week who turned 23 today, so plus the cake and the great through-the-intercom wakeup song me, Greg and Jimmy had, we celebrated with McDonalds icecream.

Frölunda Torg

At last, I and Greg had some fun with a sign on Pressbyrån. The sign says “Show your ID”, but the Swedish word for “ID” is “Leg”. Enjoy.

Show your leg?!

That was all for today, folks. I don’t think I can promise daily updates on this blog, after all I am on a ship and any type of Internet connection is a deviation from normality.

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Life | Tagged | Comments (0)

Back to Fiskebäck

Sunday, January 7, 2007 – 13:34

I’m leaving Västerås to go back to Elida in Gothenburg today. After little more than two weeks at home, I’ve started to long back to my friends aboard the ship. I believe that I will start to work on the Radar on depth sounding equipment as soon as I come back.
Yesterday I invited some of my friends over to my place. We watched a movie (Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life), ate a little and talked a lot. Since this has been the last vacation week, many people are travelling to their jobs/schools/whatever today.

Bye, Västerås! See you in a couple of months again!

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Howto: Hauppauge Nova-T 500 PCI under Linux

Saturday, January 6, 2007 – 14:50

Note: This is a technical guide aimed at a specific audience. If you happen to read this blog and have no interest in Linux and TV cards, skip this post.

Note 2: This guide is obsolete! Use at your own risk. This guide is a lot better!

My father and I recently bought a Hauppauge Nova-T 500 TV card to extend the functionality of our current TV computer. The nice thing with this card is the fact that it contains two tuners in one card, allowing two simultaneous TV recordings or watchings at the same time.

We unpacked the box and plugged the card in to our computer. The manual recommended the card to be put in PCI slot #1 or 2 for unknown reasons, but it felt best to comply. When we booted, however, I got confused.

We had indeed installed a PCI card, but there was no TV card in the PCI listing (given by the ‘lspci’ command). We thought there was something wrong with the card at first.

When inserting the card into a Windows computer, we understood where the problem was. At first, Windows recognized a new USB root hub on the computer, and only after that came the TV card. Hauppauge had made the ingenious decision of having two USB TV receivers on the card, controlled by an internal USB hub. The reasons for that I can guess is to save costs using the same chipset for both their external USB cards, and the internal what-seems-to-be-PCI cards.

So, back with the card to the Linux box, and discovering that there actually were a lot of new entries in the PCI listing, USB controllers. A quick glance on the USB listing (‘lsusb’ under Linux), showed a happy Hauppauge card.

After discovering the inner workings of the card, it was time to configure it. Apparently, the drivers were not included in the Linux kernel before version 2.6.19, and the most recent stock kernel for the Ubuntu system was 2.6.17. Time to go back and compile your own kernel from kernel.org.

If your system has at least kernel version 2.6.19, there is no need for compiling your own. The kernel version is checked with the command ‘uname -r’. In the kernel, you need to enable modular support for the “dib0700″ chipset, which is somewhere under Device Drivers > Multimedia. Make sure the dialog says “(M)” and not “(*)” for the specific driver.

After compiling and installing the kernel (providing those instructions is outside the scope of this document) you must reboot and then find a firmware file for the kernel to use. For this specific card I needed the file “dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw”, which I couldn’t find anywhere on the net at first. The primary mirror for this file was offline, but after one hour of searching I luckily found an RPM containing several firmwares, along with this one.

To make the path easier for everybody else, I here provide these files on my server here.

NOTE: The above files are very obsolete, and should not be used. linuxtv.org has newer files.

So, extract the file named “dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw” and copy it to the directory /lib/firmware. Then load the module dvb-usb-dib0700 using the following command:

modprobe dvb-usb-dib0700

(many systems require that you add “sudo” to the command line before the “modprobe” command.

You just loaded the driver into the kernel. Felt something? That was just the feeling of being one step closer to a working dual TV tuner card. Note that the “modprobe” command should return nothing if it works. If you get outputs like “FATAL: Module dvb-usb-dib0700 not found.” you have to make sure that you compiled in support for the TV card into the kernel.

If modprobe worked, check the output of the command ‘dmesg’. If it works, you should have something like this in the last few lines:

[ 47.706381] dib0700: loaded with support for 2 different device-types
[ 47.755845] dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
[ 47.831894] dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw'
[ 48.004945] dib0700: firmware started successfully.
[ 48.106970] dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T' in warm state.
[ 48.107568] dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer.
[ 48.107929] DVB: registering new adapter (Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T).
[ 48.191285] DVB: registering frontend 1 (DiBcom 3000MC/P)...
[ 48.192903] MT2060: successfully identified (IF1 = 1220)
[ 48.657038] dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer.
[ 48.657373] DVB: registering new adapter (Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T).
[ 48.661165] DVB: registering frontend 2 (DiBcom 3000MC/P)...
[ 48.663158] MT2060: successfully identified (IF1 = 1220)
[ 49.129041] dvb-usb: Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T successfully initialized and connected.
[ 49.129071] usbcore: registered new interface driver dvb_usb_dib0700

Basically, what it says is that the firmware gets loaded (“dib0700: firmware started successfully“) and that the frontend gets registered (“MT2060: successfully identified“) and finally gets the card to work (“dvb-usb: Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T successfully initialized and connected“)

If this is your case, you can happily go on and set up MythTV or <insert your favorite PVR system here>.

Otherwise, let’s do some debugging. Most often, you forgot to provide the system with the correct firmware file. Extract the file “dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw” to /lib/firmware, nothing else. Make sure you got support for your dib0700 in the kernel configuration and that the kernel is really 2.6.19 or higher. If you get stuck, post a comment in the form on the bottom of the page, and I or one of my many readers will probably help you.

Your TV card should show up in the directory /dev/dvb (might vary on other systems than my Ubuntu installation) as two entries; adapter0 and adapter1 (This might also vary if you have more TV cards in the computer).

Now, configure the DVB card as you would with any card. I use MythTV, and those instructions can be found here. I don’t feel like writing another MythTV guide here, there are so many out there already.

Happy tuning!

Note that I never tried connecting the remote control, many readers have commented that the remote doesn’t work yet. You will need a third-party remote or do as I am doing and use another card with a remote control.

As a conclusion, I find the Nova-T 500 an excellent card with good support under Linux except for the remote control. The driver seems pretty new, though, so there are probably improvements and bugfixes on the way in new Linux versions. Still, with our computer, a 1.8 GHz with 768 MB of memory, we can now record three DVB-T streams simultaneously (using one Nova-T 500 and one older Nova-T card) without any problems at all.

I can only recommend this card, although it still requires some compiling to get working. I believe Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (in beta at the time of writing) has support for the card out of the box (but you still need the firmware).

If this guide was helpful, I would appreciate you leaving a comment here. Also comment if something doesn’t work or if you have additional suggestions. Thank you!

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Guides | Tagged , , , , | Comments (86)